


Built On Top Of The Dead

by timeheist



Category: Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-04
Updated: 2012-06-04
Packaged: 2017-11-06 20:33:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/422907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/timeheist/pseuds/timeheist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It hadn’t been at all easy. When he’d heard the news, and heard what GeneCo was accomplishing from their high horses, he’d known what had to be done in order to survive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Built On Top Of The Dead

Once, someone asked him why he was so comfortable around dead bodies.

People were either curious, or didn’t give a damn; it was a reasonable question, Graverobber supposed. One, he hung around with dead bodies more than he did live ones. Heck, some people even had the strange persuasion that he had a thing for them, couldn’t get it up with a living, breathing girls. Of course the scalpel sluts and Amber Sweet didn’t – really – think that, for which he was (eternally) grateful. Two, he worked with dead bodies, and made his living out of what he could... Harvest from them. Not that harvest was the right word, extracting Zydrate was something of a precise art – if one could call stabbing a syringe into the right bodies an art – and he revelled in being so well renowned for it. Even if it did earn him a criminal record to boot. Not that he cared; he was by far the lesser of many, many evils in the city.

But it was still a decent question, and he had to give them that. As well as acquiring and peddling Zydrate, Graverobber knew a lot about what was going on in the city, and yet people knew very little about him. Not even a real name for the wanted posters and damned if he was going to let that one slip. He was Graverobber, through and through; it was a description, and award, and a title all rolled up into one. Not that he was the only one, but he was – if he did say so himself (which he did) – the best of the brood. Even the addicts knew it and he sometimes wondered if anything stuck in their minds at all outside of the irregular schedule of drinking, screwing around and getting high. Eating and sleeping he supposed too, but since he barely remembered his own schedule and his head was screwed on – he barely touched the Z himself – he doubted that they did. It was a way of life, much like his.

As for why he was so casual about bodies? Well, living, dead, what was the difference? They still kept him in business, and in a way, he was the bringer of life, wasn’t he? The recycling of the dead for the living. But that wasn’t the real reason. See, to become Graverobber he had to commit a murder, and fake a death, both one and the same. Out with the old (not so old thank you, he still had that damn voice of his!) and in with the new; industrialisation had crippled the globe and to survive, a person had to evolve, right? Well, he’d evolved himself right into an empty grave, something resembling a coffin, and his one and only real Zydrate hit to date. All in the same night, just to start anew. Old Graverobber was so adept around dead bodies – and living ones too, ladies and genterns alike! – because the first grave that he robbed was his very own. Graverobber’s very own home sweet bleeding home.

It hadn’t been at all easy. When he’d heard the news, and heard what GeneCo was accomplishing from their high horses, he’d known what had to be done in order to survive. He’d not touched the needles, the scalpels, or the implants. He wasn’t in debt. That made him rich, but it also made him both dangerous, and in danger. With money he could do all kinds of things, all kinds of people, and all kinds of murder, but he hadn’t wanted to, not really, maybe only deep down. With money, people wanted to do all kinds of things to him for that money, and none of them were mighty fine thank you kindly. Sure you could get away with murder if you talked sweetly to the right people – and somehow the voice like a twenty year habitual smoker seemed to twixt the right people in strange ways – but what better way to escape the law and order by cutting yourself out of the equation? In a way, it was a form of surgery. An exorcism sweet as the streets and more painless than a gentern’s scalpel.

Death by overdose. Not uncommon, especially when the Largos had just brought out their latest brand of Zydrate, patent pending. Luckily for him he’d signed a contract keeping his body parts under lock and key – at least legally – before this addiction and gotten out of control and the genterns and repo men alike had to leave his organs alone. No one could play him, least not while he was busy playing them. A couple hard-earned drugs to slow the heart beat, a bribed undertaker and a couple of days faking his own death later, he was crawling around a communal grave, wishing the sun would come up one day so he could see where he was going, looking for a healthy specimen for Z. Or, well, a healthy enough specimen, seeing as all the bodies were y’know dead. The hardest part, I have on good authority, was getting the little glass vials to put the Zydrate in once he had it harvested. People recognized him but it was easier to just say he was dead, all the money was gone anyway. Not that anyone ever believed it, and the Zydrate brought it right back up again in a flash.

It only took GeneCo a week to print up the wanted posters. Startling likeness, dont’cha think? No? Well, of course not. You’re just here for the Z.


End file.
